Heinlein, Robert A – Expanded Universe

is not, it is fiction-written by request to celebrate the 50th anniversary of

Amazing Stories. In PANDORA’S BOX I was trying hard to extrapolate rationally to

most probable answers 50 years in the future (and in November1979 I gave myself a

score of66%-anybody want to buy a used crystal ball with a crack in it?).

But in this short-short I wrote as if I were alive in 2001 and writing a

retrospective of the 20th century. Of course everyone knows what happened in 2001;

they found a big black monolith on Luna-but in 19561 didn’t know that. So I wrote as

far out as I thought I could get away with (to be entertaining) while trying to make

the items sound plausible and possible if not likely.

Figures in parentheses refer to notes at the end.

Page 159

“Has it ever occurred to you

that God might be a committee?”

-Jubal Harshaw

THE THIRD MILLENNIUM

OPENS

Now, at the beginning of the year 2001, it is time to see where we have been

and guess at where we are going. A thousand years ago Otto III ruled the Holy Roman

Empire, William the Conqueror was not yet born, and the Discovery of America was

almost five hundred years in the future. The condition of mankind had not changed in

most important respects since the dawn of history. Aside from language and local

custom a peasant of 1000 B.C. would have been right at home in a village of 1001

A.D.

He would not be so today!

The major changes took place in the last two centuries, but the most

significant change of all occurred in the last fifty years, during the lifetimes of

many of us. In 1950 six out of ten persons could neither read nor write; today an

illiterate person is a freak.(1)

More people have learned to read and write in the past fifty years than in

all the thousands of years preceding

1950.

This one change is more worldshaking than the establishment this last year

of the laboratory outpost on Pluto. We think of this century just closed as the one

in which mankind conquered space; it would be more appropriate to think of it as the

century in which the human race finally learned to read and write.

(Let’s give the Devil his due; the contagious insanities of the past

century-communism, xenophobia, aggressive nationalism, the explosions of the

formerly colonial peoples-have done more to spread literacy than the efforts of all

the do-gooders in history. The Three R’s suddenly became indispensable weapons in

mankind’s bloodiest struggles-learn to read, or die. Out of bad has come good; a man

who can read and write is nine-tenths free even in chains.)

But something else has happened as important as the ABC’s. The big-muscled

accomplishments of the past fifty years-like sea-farming, the fantastic

multiplication of horsepower, and spaceships, pantographic factories, the Sahara

Sea, reflexive automation, tapping the Sun-overshadow the most radical advance,

i.e., the first fumbling steps in founding a science of the human mind.

Fifty years ago hypnotism was a parlor trick, clairvoyance was superstition,

telepathy was almost unknown, and parapsychology was on a par with phrenology and

not as respectable as the most popular nonsense called astrology.

Do we have a “science of the mind” today? Far from it. But we do have- A

Certainty of Survival after Death, proved with scientific rigor more complete than

that which we apply to heat engines. It is hard to believe that it was only in 1952

that Morey Bernstein, using hypnotic regression, established the personal survival

of Bridget Murphy- and thereby turned the western world to a research that Asia and

Africa had always taken for granted.(2)

Telepathy and Clairvoyance for Military Purposes. The obvious effect was the

changing of war from a “closed” game to an “open” game in the mathematical sense,

with the consequence that assassination is now more important than mass weapons. It

may well be that no fusion bomb or plague weapon will ever again be used-it would

take a foolhardy dictator even to consider such when he knows that his thoughts are

being

monitored . . . and that assassination is so much harder to stop than a rocket bomb.